


Scenes from a Life in the Making

by Yina_Ke



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (background) Scott McCall/Allison Argent, (one-sided) Isaac Lahey/Scott Mccall, Allusions to canon past-abuse, Alternate Universe - College AU, Anal Sex, Bisexual Character, Drunk Sex, Growing Up, Isaac-centric fic, M/M, Mentions of Stiles/OC's, Oral Sex, Philosophical ramblings may occur, Pining, but also gay sex, canon-typical ableist language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 17:28:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yina_Ke/pseuds/Yina_Ke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Isaac's story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scenes from a Life in the Making

**Author's Note:**

> THIS FUCKING FIC ALMOST KILLED ME, I SWEAR.
> 
> It took many, many months to write, and I raced face-first into a couple of huge troubles with this, to the point where I left it to gather dust in my fanfic folder for a couple of months until Stisaac week (and tumblr user burningletter-, who never stopped bugging me about this fic) motivated me to sit down my ass and finally finish it. Many, many sleepless nights later, this is finally done. And so am I. _Done_.
> 
> Credits at the end.
> 
> Note: this fic went AU after S2, after Erica and Boyd disappeared. They are alive here. Most of S3 didn't happen (or happened differently) -- Isaac never dated Allison, although he did end up moving in with Scott. The whole going under water and hearts enshrouded in darkness yadda yadda thing did not happen, either. But I think it's not too hard to follow.
> 
> It's Stisaac, but the one-sided Isaac/Scott is also very important. It gets resolved, though, kind of.
> 
> Warning for drunk (but really, more like tipsy) sex, canon-typical ableist language, one rather graphic depiction of an anxiety attack, and allusions to canon past abuse.
> 
> Also, fair warning: this isn't really a romantic fic. It's not really about the ship so much as it is about Isaac.

 

_-_

> _To: Scott_
> 
>   _I'm here._

 

Isaac considers adding more, but decides against it. He leans against the hood of his car and tilts back his head, turning his face toward the sky. The chill of the day sinks into his bones, but it's not nearly as cold as it was the last time he saw Scott.

 His phone lights up with the reply. The chilly March sun reflects on his phone's display, and Isaac has to bend over it and try to shield it with his hands before he can read the words.

 

> _From: Scott_
> 
> _awesome meet me in front of the gym_

 

Isaac's just about to shoot a message back when his screen lights up again.

 

>   _From: Scott_
> 
>   _dw you can't miss it only 5 mins away from you_

 

 Isaac spends seconds staring at the words. Then he pockets his phone, wraps his scarf around his neck a bit more tightly, and sets his feet in motion. He passes several buildings. Students spill out of most of them in regular, but entirely random intervals, carrying books or bags and chattering in groups. The spring breeze catches a girl's hair and raises it like a banner.

 A couple of tall boys pass Isaac. He only catches fragments of their conversation, but he can fill in the rest. Exams. Parties. Sports games. Midterms. Bad cafeteria food. Inordinate tuition fees. Politics. New crushes, new loves. All the usual stuff that every student on every college campus talks about.

 Isaac may as well have gone to _this_ one.

 He spots Scott before he sees anything fitting the description of a gym. He's standing at the edge of the street, hands in his pockets, eyes scanning the crowd. Isaac hasn't yet been spotted, so he takes the opportunity to look at Scott for a couple of beats.

 It's the first time he's seen Scott since New Year's, and the clench in Isaac's stomach is sudden and thrilling. Scott's traded in the hoodies he used to wear in high school for a fitted plaid shirt, switched his choice of footwear to nice-looking brown sneakers. Scott looks different and he looks the same (smells the same, _feels_ the same, even from this distance) and for one single moment, Isaac feels like he never left.

 It's all the same.

 Then Isaac raises his hand, waves, calls, “ _Scott_ ,” and everything is different.

 

-

 

They go to a coffee shop.

 It's Scott who suggested it, after Isaac released him from that hug. The sun hung high in the apex of the sky, and Isaac shielded his eyes against them while he looked at Scott and searched his face.

 Scott stood there and he was smiling – grinning – _beaming_ – and the sun collected in his dimples and shone. Isaac would have agreed to anything.

 They sit down after getting their coffee from the counter, and Isaac unwinds the two layers of scarves, lets them hang limply down his chest. Scott's been talking the entire time, and Isaac returns every compliment with a tentative smile.

 “You look good,” Scott says. He's said it before, at least twice. “Like, _God_.” He reaches across the table; his fingers brush against the back of Isaac's hand with easy affection. “I missed you, I really did. So tell me, what's new with you?”

 Isaac looks at him from beyond the space across the table. The mugs, Isaac's own steaming cup of Americano and that sweet frappe that Scott ordered, stand in a symmetrical line at opposite ends of the table.

 Isaac shifts forward on his seat. “Nothing much,” he says. “I mean, I told you all the important stuff on Skype anyway.”

 “Yeah, but that's _Skype_ ,” Scott says, swatting at the air. “It's not like real conversation. Stiles and I had to Skype for a while when I lived in Sunnyvale as a kid, and it sucked.”

 Back when Scott first went to Beacon Hills State and Isaac went to USF, for the first few months or so, they used to talk on Skype nearly every day. Scott was curious, brimmed with newly-released immunity, eager to hear the stories about San Francisco, the people Isaac met, the things he tried. Scott either never noticed or didn't care that Isaac embellished the stories to make them more dramatic, that he exaggerated how long he'd been out the night before, omitted the parts where he went home alone.

 Daily sessions trickled down to one every other day. Then one a week. Calls grew shorter, conversations more mundane. Isaac doesn't blame it on Scott, he doesn't; Scott works at the animal shelter on the weekends and in a bar on campus on weekdays. His classes are demanding, or they were last time Isaac heard. Scott rooms with _Stiles_ , and Charlie Sheen may be an easier rommate to put up with. Scott is _busy_. Scott has new friends.

 Scott has been seeing Allison again since November 12th last year.

 Isaac reaches for his mug. “There's not much to tell, really.” His fingers feel stiff from the uncharacteristic chill. “You know. Classes. Parties.” A pause. “Oh yeah, the newest scoop on the Josh-and-Mia show? They're back together.”

 “No way.” Scott smiles like this means anything. “Guess they're meant to be after all. You know, I've got to meet them some day. It sort of feels like they're my friends, too, even though I never met them, but they sort of feel like they are because they're _your_ friends.” He pauses. "They do know my name, right?"

 It's their fifth make-up after as many dramatic break-ups, just weeks after Mia crumpled in on herself outside of her dorm room, streaked mascara stark against her wan cheeks. Isaac brings the mug to his lips. The coffee burns his tongue.

 “'Course they do,” Isaac says. “They'd like you, I think." _Who doesn't?_ "They're pretty busy lately, though. I don't hang out with them as much as I used to. I mean, I still do, but you know, they've got each other.” Isaac's throat closes up and he changes tack. “I heard from Erica a while ago. She and Boyd are in Ohio now, apparently --”

 They keep talking, their voice a pleasant drizzle that blends in well when light rain starts to fall outside. There's common ground there, the familiarity that is earned through years of being friends. Scott only got wider across the shoulder. His features have only matured and settled and clicked into place, only an aesthetic amelioration of the boy he knows.

 But the chair's uncomfortable, too hard around the edges, too short for Isaac's long legs. Some top 40 pop song blares on in the background, high-pitched riffs twisting in Isaac's ears. The fluorescent lights above wash Scott's skin to a buttery tone and glint off a single pearl of sweat on his forehead.

 It's not like when they were back in high school and used to hang out in Scott's room, on the bed or a couch, falling asleep curled up next to each other circled by empty bags of popcorn and boxes of Chinese take-out. Not like when Isaac used to blink awake to air blowing against his face to find Scott hovering above him and explaining that he'd only wanted to see how hard he could blow until Isaac woke up.

 The surface of the coffee ripples with Isaac's breath.

  _( Josh said that it was to be expected. People diverged off the well-beaten paths of adolescent routine. Founded their own lives. Learned to spread themselves out thinner because one can't fly with glue-sticky wings._

  _Which sounds pretty good in theory, but Josh is also drunk more often than not. )_

 “So. Party tonight. You're in, right?” Scott drums his fingers on the table. “I wouldn't go, really, 'cause you're here and all, but it's Jill's birthday and I promised I'd be there. That's okay with you, right? I don't wanna be an awful host to one of my best friends.”

 Isaac lets the coffee sting his mouth before he swallows. “No, sure.” He licks his lips. “Sure, dude. Party sounds good. Great. Tonight?”

 “Yeah, like, in a few hours? I think it's gonna be...” His eyes slide off of Isaac's face and cut into focus at some point beyond Isaac's head.

 Isaac already knows by the way Scott's face just lit up like a thousand watt bulb who must have just waltzed in. “Hey, over here.”

 “Scotty, there you are.” Stiles saunters up until he stands right next to Scott. “About time you showed your pretty face. Did you remember to get the thing I asked you to get for Jill tonight?”

 Isaac has no choice but to shift his eyes and look at him.

 Stiles looks better than he did, but Isaac already knew that from the times he caught him in the background of Scott's web cam, and those three or four times they met since they graduated high school last summer. Isaac hasn't seen him in months now, though. He's taller and buffer and his chin's squared some. The fat on his cheeks has wilted so his skin clings to bones surprisingly high on his face. He wears glasses now, and Isaac would have thought they'd make him look geeky, but instead they suit him, highlight his angles, put a startling emphasis to his bone structure. Rain drops glisten in his hair.

 None of that is what strikes Isaac as so inherently _different_.

 “Lahey,” Stiles says. There's still traces of sarcasm on his face when he smiles. “I'm so glad to see you.”

 “Well, you finally put on some glasses,” Isaac says. “Good to see you, too.”

 The color of Stiles' shirt and that of his jeans actually _match_.

 Stiles gestures at Isaac's neck. “Still with the scarves, I see.”

 “We love your scarves,” Scott says with a grin. “Stiles does, especially.”

 “Oh no, no, no, no.” Stiles shakes his head. “Scott, you're one to talk. Let me tell you, Isaac, he's been talking about you constantly. _Constantly_. You should hear the way he goes on about you.”

 “Dude, do not,” Scott says. “ _You're_ the one who wouldn't shut up about Isaac.” His gaze flickers over to Isaac. “But seriously, he was asking me all the time what day you'd arrive, I swear.”

 Stiles scoffs, then gives a languid shrug. “Guess we'll have to fight over you, Lahey.”

 “Mark me down for horrified,” Isaac says, voice dry. He glances from one to the other.

 “And oddly aroused,” he says, and Stiles and Scott both say it right along with him. They each chuckle and send a look around the group. So they all remember this phrase that somehow became a _thing_ their senior year. It eases the tension between Isaac's shoulders.

 Maybe it did for Stiles, too: Stiles' features slide back from his typical pent-up exaggeration to something that's the closest to _mellow_ that Isaac's ever seen on his face. His eyes dart across Isaac's face, slow smile undulating across his lips. He says, “Yeah. Yeah, come here.”

 Stiles pulls on Isaac's hand and he lets himself be pulled up. Stiles slaps him on the arm, and then the ease sizzles out of the air like rain on hot stone when they spend the next few seconds awkwardly standing in front of each other. It reminds Isaac of what it's like to pass someone on the street and not being able to decide which way they'll swerve until they end up nearly running into each other half a dozen times over.

 He's not sure he's ever really hugged Stiles before. He might have, on the day that he left for San Francisco and the entire pack showed up to send him off with balloons and glistening eyes and crumbled farewell notes in their hands.

 Either way, it's long ago. They're not best friends.

 Stiles _does_ pull him into a hug at long last, but it's a tentative one, as if they're two war veterans awkwardly patting each other on the shoulders because they're afraid to rip open old wounds. The hug just has enough length and contact not to look enormously awkward to bystanders, and then Stiles takes a step back and Scott gets up to stand next to him, and Isaac looks at them both.

 Isaac feels like he's being pulled into many different directions at once. Something churns in his stomach, and he looks from Scott to Stiles and from Stiles to Scott. He tries not to wonder.

 He wouldn't have time to process it all.

 Then Scott says, “We're all really glad you're here, Allison is coming up later tonight for the party too,” and something in Isaac's body, higher than his crotch but below his neck, gives a jolt.

 

–

 

 In retrospect, their senior year of high school seems to have gone by in a blur.

 It didn't seem that way when it was happening. Life-threatening experiences beat the routine out of each and every day. Blood from the night before cleared the lenses on the following morning's sunrise. Dark horrors were the matches that set alight the bonfires on Saturday nights.

 They spent most of their senior year together, Isaac and Scott and Stiles and Lydia and Allison. The other students proved resistant to adjusting to the different rhythm of their lives. College was all anyone talked about at Beacon Hills High, and ironically enough, what tales of werewolves and monsters and dark things in the night may have been to the rest of the student body, college was to them.

 Which is to say, it never seemed real. Until it did.

 Before that, their junior year, they had each spent time compiling lists of colleges they'd like to go to, but it had been a game, more like sitting down with a little globe and fantasizing about all the different places they'd see, spinning the globe and travel plans at the same time, knowing full well they'd never go. Once senior year had waltzed in with aplomb, the abstraction of college had drifted away again. They'd been like children who thought that if they just ignored the future, it would never come.

 Lydia was the first one to say it. It might have been fall, November maybe. It rained and fine mist soaked the air beneath a still-bright cyan sky. Allison laughed, holding on to Scott's arm while he spun a hoodie above both their heads to keep them dry. Isaac and Stiles were up ahead, about to climb into Stiles' Jeep when Stiles turned around and said, “Hey Lydia, you coming or not?”

 “Can't,” Lydia said, and she avoided everyone's eyes by looking into her purse. “I've got to finish my application essay for Yale.”

 The mist-wet air cooled. All eyes were on Lydia. She raised her head, spun around once, sweeping them all with a cursory gaze. “Well, you've all started on your applications, right?”

 Allison and Scott exchanged glances. Isaac studied a smudge on the ground. Stiles shifted.

 “Senior year doesn't last forever.” Lydia's breath came out white and opaque in the rain. “Our government doesn't really recognize supernatural-hunting as a valid job description.”

 “Suckers,” Stiles said.

 One day, close to New Year's, Isaac, Scott, Stiles and Allison were researching Korean myths on nine-tailed foxes in the library. It turned out that Stiles claimed he could think better when he was busy with his hands, and that Isaac's scarves were perfect to fiddle around with. Stiles was toying with the stringy ends of his scarf and Isaac was sitting there wearing the face of the eternally resigned when Lydia blazed in and sauntered up to the four of them.

 She did get into Yale, and Harvard, too. She was going to go to Berkeley, though. Yale was great, but the East Coast was way too cold. People may or may not be snotty. Out-of-state tuition fees were _horrendous_.

 They all knew that Lydia was set to get a full scholarship anyway, no matter where she went. No one pointed it out.

 Stiles stopped toying with Isaac's scarf that day.

 All their grades had suffered some time during their high school career. Bruised ribs were not conducive to math, dark thoughts only moderately helpful in poetry class. The feverish mirage of their lives left them burned out and tired and spent. But they were a pack of sorts, each of them a piece of a whole, and they learned to complement each other. Stiles tutored Isaac in physics sometimes, Allison helped Scott with history, Lydia buzzed about and pontificated rules and formulas and trivia like a stiletto-heeled friar of knowledge with perfect hair. Stiles' GPA was near the top of their class, Allison and Isaac's in the upper third. Scott's a little above average.

 Scott's good enough to go to a four-year university, but not good enough to go to just any.

 One day in early spring, when the days lengthened again and the sun dappled golden on the grass, Isaac spent a night at Derek's loft, perfecting his lessons on control. It meant that he didn't wake up in the same room as Scott, and didn't eat breakfast with him, and didn't walk to school with him.

 Didn't see Scott, in fact, until he pranced into French class, a skip to his feet, and unceremoniously plopped down on his chair. “Stiles. Isaac. Guess what?”

 Stiles didn't raise his eyes from his notes. “You finally figured out why wanting to see Luke and Leia together is wrong?”

 “What? Why's it wrong?”

 Isaac shifted on his chair. “What's up?”

 A smile split Scott's face, bright and dazzling and somehow magnetic.

 “I got in,” Scott said, and the air around them swelled like an orchestra hall. “I got my acceptance letter this morning. Beacon Hills State.”

 Stiles' pen stopped mid-stroke. Something in his eyes shifted.

 Isaac swallowed. “That's great. Really great. That was your first choice, right?”

 “Yeah,” Scott said, folding his arms over the back of his chair. “Hey, so how 'bout you guys? Any news?”

 Earlier that morning, before Scott had come in, Isaac had seen Stiles stuff several big envelopes into his bag. He hadn't asked. ( _But he had_ seen).

 “Nah, dude,” Stiles said, after a beat. A beat that had lasted just a bit too long. “None yet. More waiting for Isaac and me, right?”

 Isaac glanced at Stiles, and the air between them stilled. “Right.”

 Isaac came home to three different acceptance letters just a few days after that. He laid them out in front of him and looked from one to the other until his eyes swam and everything blurred together in the cresting wave of anticipation and adulation and possibility and _fear_.

 That's how Scott found him, strolling into the living room with a yoghurt and a spoon in his hands. He looked at Isaac. Blinked. “You got in?”

 Isaac said nothing. The letters rang loud and clear enough.

 Scott hugged him from behind. He smelled of faint sweat and Scott and _pack_. “Nice selection. Is that – you got into USF?” Scott squeezed Isaac's right shoulder. “That's great. Great. San Francisco, yeah? Wow.”

 “Yeah.” The word dropped down. “Yeah.”

 Scott went still behind him. “Hey, you earned that spot, why aren't you celebrating?” He sounded genuinely puzzled. “Think of all the things you'll do, places you'll see, and hey, it's not that far away. From Beacon Hills, I mean.”

 “It's not about that,” Isaac said, voice taut. _Isn't it?_ “It's not that I'm not happy, I am, it just just seems like – it's like right now, we're in this space between being kids and being adults, and we'll never be that way again, and it seemed a distant future thing before, and now – it's _here_. Stamped and signed. Inevitable. Boarding call and no return ticket.”

 “... I guess change is never _not_ a bit scary, too.” Scott moved back one arm until it just dangled off of Isaac's shoulder. “But that's how it is. I mean, that's what's left to do. Moving forward. After high school, there's college. That's how it is. It's a good thing.”

 Scott had a gift for making things sound simple.

 Isaac dropped his eyes to his hands. “I could stay in Beacon Hills, too.” Isaac let the words linger. Felt their impact in the air, how the molecules rippled around them. “I could --”

 “Why would you go _there_?” Scott said. “USF is much more prestigious, man. And hey.” He hesitated. “We'll still be friends, Isaac.”

 Isaac's heart ricocheted inside his ribcage.

 Irrational anger flared. “I _know_. Why do you keep bringing that up? I'm not --”

 “Okay,” Scott said, and cut him off. “Okay, Isaac.”

 It made Isaac's anger rouse and drain and ebb away. His temper was like the tide sometimes, and like the real tide, like shells and fish and forgotten things, it left behind residue.

 “It'll be fine,” Scott said, and his tone dropped and dropped and clanged down right along the line between assertion and authority.

 Isaac shook curls out of his forehead.

 Scott looked back at him, eyes like physical weights that hooked Isaac's mind and netted his heart, and Isaac felt weaponless and powerless and entirely fucking _numb_.

 Sensation bled back into his veins. “You're right,” he said, and as he said it, something stirred inside him. “You're right. It will be great.”

 “We'll still be pack,” Scott said, and his eyes were warm again.

 “I'm horrified,” Isaac said, and hid the truth of it. “And not even oddly aroused.”

 Isaac liked the way the tension fell off Scott's shoulders. “It's college,” Scott said. His face twitched into a boyish smile. “You will be.”

 

-

 

 People always say that there's enough love to go around for everyone in the world. As if it were a non-competitive public good.

Isaac doesn't think so. He thinks love is a rarity, coined in attention, traded with affection, stored in the cramped display of mental space. It's a competitive commodity like everything else.

 

-

 

 By the time they walk out of the coffee shop, it's stopped raining. They spend the afternoon talking.

 Well that, and touring campus, with Scott taking the lead (and he _would_ ), and Stiles trailing behind him next to Isaac (and he _would_ ), and Isaac struggling to stay interested in which dead white guy founded which buildings. There are times when Scott speaks to the empty air while Stiles and Isaac's attention gets arrested by passing groups of pretty girls. Stiles will smile at them; more than a few will smile back.

 Scott and Stiles still have the same easy chemistry they always had, quick glances and inside jokes and weird communications across some sort of telepathic _Scott and Stiles_ radio that only they can tune in to. They stop in front of a tree and Stiles tries to talk Scott into climbing up for shits and giggles until he finally does. Scott waves down at them. Fingers of sun light rifle through his hair from beyond and Isaac looks up at him and then at Stiles and at Scott again.

 He used to hate Stiles for it, once, back when he'd first come to (rely on) (love) _like_ Scott. Maybe part of him always will.

 Scott climbs down, and they find a spot on the stairs of some big building and open a few cans of coke. They look up when the sun starts to spill across the sky and sinks into the grasp of the buildings cluttered around them. They launch into a discussion about girls, and it's the same conversation all over again, the ones they had in high school. Stiles is into blondes, Isaac prefers brunettes, and Scott is pretty exclusively into girls whose name starts with _A_ and ends in - _llison_.

 Isaac tells them that he really digs Eva Green in _The Dreamers, because like_ wow, hel _lo_ , and Stiles thinks about it before he says that she was quite hot, but so was Michael Pitt.

 When Isaac glances to the side, he catches Stiles looking at him.

 They make to a bar right off campus after. There's a cluster of people around, standing in groups or swaying to the music. The place is not yet packed and Isaac gets a full view of the long bar counter at the back of the room, unprofessionally done with a row of liquor bottles gleaming on a shelf at the back. There's the beat of some sort of indie rock song in the air, guitar riffs eclectic but vibrant.

 Jill is predictably pretty and predictably nice, but Isaac doesn't know how to talk to her.

 He's always had this thing with girls: he either comes on too strong, or not at all. Isaac's always felt like most social interactions were a game without rules, where all he could do was volley words into an untainted playing field without knowing which game they were playing, or whether he'd even used the right equipment.

 Jill's sweet, though. When they arrive, she hugs both Scott and Stiles, kisses each of their cheeks, then flashes Isaac a radiant smile. She's at ease with Stiles, linking her arm with his, laughing at his jokes. She's got dark hair and pale, pale skin, but when Stiles leans in to tell her something, Isaac watches the faint blotches of red blossom on her cheeks and along the bridge of her nose.

 After several minutes of this, Isaac decides to buy a round. He weaves in between the scattered tables and drops down in front of the bar to the counter's far end. He places his elbows on the table, and runs a hand through his hair.

 Whoever is manning the bar finished their sojourn across the room and leans against the counter from the other side. “Rough night?”

 Isaac looks up.

 The bartender's lips are twisted into a searching grin. She's very tall, maybe almost as tall as Isaac, but not nearly as gawky. She's brown-skinned and white-toothed and red-lipped; all Isaac can think of for a good few seconds is that she's kind of hot.

 “What gave it away?” Isaac finally manages. “Was it my brimming enthusiasm?”

 “I was going to say the fact that you looked like you were fantasizing about introducing someone's entrails to a kitchen knife for a moment there,” she says easily, “but I'll take what I can get. You with Scott and Stiles?”

 “Wow,” Isaac says. Even in college, they're _Scott and Stiles_. “I need a drink.”

 The bartender offers a mild smile. “So, what's your poison?”

 “Everything's my poison,” Isaac says. “What's theirs?”

 “Scott and Stiles?” she shrugs. “Scott will drink anything offered to him, but he won't ever get buzzed, that's the mystery of it all. Kids here started making a betting pool on who would be the first to get him drunk his very first _week_ here; yeah, don't look at me like that, that's how they roll.”

 “I am not even remotely surprised,” Isaac says.

 “Betting pool's up to a couple hundred last time I checked. Stiles? More of a stoner, but he'll drink. Start with beer if you don't want to accidentally end up in bed with him at the end of the night.”

 “Right.”

 She grins, and it's as fox-sly as he imagined. “I'm serious.”

 Isaac drums his fingers against the counter. “When we were in high school, I once watched him shovel five hot dogs into his mouth in as many minutes and dramatically choke on three of them,” Isaac says. “I'm pretty sure that's not happening.”

 “Oh. High school friend, huh?” The bartender leans in with a knowing smirk. “You're _Isaac_. Their _other_ best friend. Explains a lot.”

 Fuck.

 Isaac darts a glance back to Stiles, Scott, Jill, and (by now) a group of other people, and it's in _this_ precise moment that Stiles looks up and their eyes latch onto each other across the ambient murmur of the bar.

 “Have they said anything?” Isaac presses down the nervousness in his voice. “I mean, about me.”

 “Sweetie.” She puts her elbows on the counter. “He's been talking about you so much I'm pretty sure I'm familiar with things like your favorite color, your shoe size, or that one time you crashed a motorcycle into school. Which I'm quite frankly rather impressed by.”

 Isaac blinks. “Which one?”

 She grins. “Well, I put a lot of stock in what they say about men and shoe sizes.”

 “No,” Isaac says. Was that a _dick joke_? “I mean, which one did you mean, Scott or Stiles? 'He' –?”

 Her expression stills, and her gaze flickers to the left. “Stiles. Hey.”

 Isaac's eyes follow hers.

 “Ale, he giving you trouble?” Stiles' grin is irritatingly comfortable and natural.

The bartender – Ale, that's her name apparently – just shrugs, echoing Stiles' grin. “Trouble, no. Sexual frustration just by breathing? You bet.”

 Embarrassment twinges in Isaac's stomach.This is too much like the sort of feigned sexual interest with the purpose of eventual humiliation that he used to endure, and he _knows_ that isn't what this is, but it still reminds him of shit that makes his skin go cold, so he says, “Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm getting kind of annoyed.”

She gives him a blank look. “There a right way to take that, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” Isaac says. “By doing your job and getting me two shots of Jack.”

She shrugs, and lets the barb roll right off her back, throwing a towel over her shoulder. “ID."

Isaac has a fake ID; they all got some aided by Danny when they were in high school and slowly got into bar-hopping. He's pretty sure that Ale knows that Isaac's only nineteen.

She doesn't inspect his ID too closely. "Coming right up. With special service, too,” she says, and then she saunters away.

Isaac looks at her ass and wonders what the fuck is wrong with him.

Stiles sits down next to him because _of course_ he does. 

"It means she's gonna charge you more, you know," Stiles says conversationally. “That's what she means by 'special service.' I've tried telling her it sort of makes her sound like a masseuse at a clandestine massage parlor, but I think that very fact numbers among the list of reasons why she thinks it's funny.”

"Don't talk to me," Isaac says.

"Dude, you've known me for _how_ long and you still don't know I always do the exact opposite of what I'm told? Guess you're stuck with me for the entire night."

 Stiles is probably exactly the sort of dickhead who should not be hanging around werewolves.

 Ale comes back with the shots, and places them on the counter before him. Stiles leans in. "One for me?"

"No," Isaac says.

Stiles shrugs, snatches one shot off the table, and knocks it back. He pulls an exaggerated face and says, "Ugh, burns. Burns so good, man."

"How altruistic of you to kill your own brain cells," Isaac says.

"Got plenty to spare." Stiles drums his fingers against the glass.

Isaac looks away with a sneer, glancing over his shoulder.

He tries to look for Scott, but the first thing he notices is that the room is filling. Throngs of people press in from the front door and contribute to the miasma of distorted conversations in the room. Isaac reaches for his own shot, downing it.

"I know the party kinda sucks so far," Stiles says. "It'll get better, though, once people start coming. Still early, you know?"

Isaac takes another look around. Scott is talking to Jill, laughing about something she says, then poses with her for a couple of selfies. Isaac can feel the beam of his smile even across the room.

He says, "So, what's it like? Rooming with Scott?"

“Oh, man.” Stiles seems to bite down a chuckle at the corners of his mouth. “Right, okay. He's kind of a dork, so he'll study 'till late and then wake up in the morning with his face in his English textbook. Then he gets up and it's like, seven at this point, and then he attempts to drown himself in the sink. After which he like shakes his head and I get  involuntarily spray-showered while I'm just hanging out, trying to brush my fucking teeth. Oh, and he snores, like, really loud, and have you _smelled_ his socks? No, of course you haven't, else you wouldn't be here.” Stiles shakes his head. “Yet, I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Stiles drifts into thought, eyes finding the middle space.

Isaac thinks he's probably never seen him so contemplative. He's so used to Stiles' face being a cauldron of tics and movements and reactions that their absence is striking. It brings out his features better, his chin, the slight upturn of his nose, the sharp line of his jaw. His lashes are framed by the light reflected on someone's glass standing right behind him.

Isaac says, “Okay, whatever,” and looks over his shoulder back to find Scott – and Allison, Allison who stands there and whose smile dashes right at him. Isaac may have spent an entire army of potential descendants on that smile, once.

Now it kickstarts his flight instinct for one single, gut-wrenching moment before he realizes she's seen him, that she has both her eyes fastened to his face, and he knows he's got to go.

“Allison's here,” he says to Stiles out of the corner of his mouth, then slides off. The ground feels softer now than it did before.

Stiles calls, “Hey, man, you forgot to --”

He weaves through the crowd, and Allison's face gains momentum with each step. Coming to a halt in front of her, he returns her smile. Her hair tickles his nose when he pulls her into a hug. He knows that shampoo. He's smelled it on Scott's hair earlier.

She lets him go, and it's only now he sees that her smile doesn't reach her eyes. “How long has it been? Christmas?”

“Yeah,” Isaac says. “Sorry I didn't stay for very long.” Christmas has always been drenched in the biting ammonium of memory.

Allison's eyes are watchful and clever. “That's fine.” She's startled when Scott puts an arm around her, but slips back into a smile with ease.

The music seems to turn up, slips into Isaac's ear and beats inside.

“It's just like old times,” Scott says.

Stiles sidles up to them with more beer and several neon-colored cocktails. He hisses to Isaac, “You owe me money now, dude, _money_ ,” while Isaac's attention is focused on Scott saying, “Only Lydia's missing. You guys hear from her lately?”

Allison takes a sip from a bright blue cocktail and stirs it. “Oh yeah, she's good, I think. She got into a debate with her math professor about some sort of unsolved mathematical problem, one of those big mysteries kind of thing, and she won.”

“'Course she would,” Stiles says, with a pointed look at Isaac. “Cheers.”

Isaac takes one of the beers, but doesn't drink. A pressure builds in his inner ear.

"We've got to ask her to visit next time you're in town," Scott says. "And maybe Derek, too."

Isaac's received exactly _one_ text message from Derek since graduating high school. _U ok?_ it said, to which Isaac replied with a sarcasm-tinged exposition of his day thus far and then spent the rest of it staring at his mute phone.

Isaac's just glad they're not vampires so there's no sire/siree bonded-for-life type of bullshit.

“Yeah, whatever,” Isaac says, and drifts off while the others keep chatting, until it feels like he's looking at them from underwater, like their mouths are moving but nothing comes out but occasional bursts of words and noises that he can't put together.

Scott and Allison still have physicality, though it's not as easy and natural as the one between him and Stiles. They trade glances, smiles and touches, yet they're not as silly and lovestruck and all-consuming like they were before; it's like their blindingly bright spark has smoothed into a stable and even body of light that glows in quiet comfort.

 _Light_ , Isaac thinks. It's starting to get duller around him.

“ – louder in here,” Scott says. Isaac's only caught the end of his sentence.

“ – filling up,” someone else says. Allison? _Jill_?

“Gonna be an awesome p – "

Someone bumps against Isaac. He whips around to glower at whoever has invaded his private space, but he only sees a back of heads, whipping bodies, a flash of someone's wrist watch like burning ember.

Voices fade in and out like a wartime broadcast. _“Hey you got the --” “Awesome party--” “More drin --” “Stop doing that --”_

Fear lodges at the back of Isaac's throat, and his stomach clenches, and sweat pearls on his forehead, and he can feel it, he can feel it, he can fucking feel it, and people are everywhere and they are nowhere ( _voices sounds people people touches cramped no escape no escape none of it no escape none no_ – )

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , his therapist has taught him how to deal with this, she's taught him, find something to focus on. He sees an image of her, her searching dark eyes. Misconceptions associated with whatever is feared. Disproportionate fear. 'Disproportionate' is a funny word, he thinks it's the _propo_ in it, and yeah, that's good, focus on something like that, lists of funny words, shopping lists, his long-buried and half-forgotten compilation of tourist Spanish phrases.

Then someone grabs him by the arm and shock _breaks_ through him. It's like there's a chandelier in the room of his chest, one full of water that's been perched atop and has now crashed and flooded every crevice, every corner, tearing through the scattered furniture, and he's _just_ –

Isaac's first instinct is murder, and he's pretty sure his eyes must be glowing yellow by now. Where is Scott. Where is Scott, where is _Scott_.

“ – saac,” someone says. “Fucking hell, Isaac, come _on_." 

Scott.

Isaac blinks. Not Scott. _Stiles_.

 

-

 

The breath he takes outside chills him to the bone.

It also sobers him up. The world before him spreads out wide and open. He doesn't know how he got out of there, only that Stiles showed up at some point and ushered him out, that Isaac kept alternating between wanting to rip him open and thank him and just _fleeing_ , and then here they are.

Lights shine forlornly in a few of the buildings around them. Everything is swathed in shadows, illuminated by a stark half-moon dangling in the sky. Isaac looks up at it, traces it with his eyes, and feels his body untangling the knots inside, draining the stress. His muscles give way, one bit at a time.

More.

And more.

“Over there,” Stiles says, and he's leading him to somewhere. Isaac follows as if his body is set on auto-pilot, as if he's drained of all free will. Go somewhere, sure. He could go anywhere.

Where he ends up going to is a porch outside of a house. There's a table set up, four chairs, but Stiles ignores it and presses his back against the wall before he slides down, shielded from sight by the banister before him. He's patting at a wet stain on his shirt, muttering a string of 'fuck's.

He catches Isaac looking. “Someone spilled some shit over my shirt. I don't even know what it was, smells horrible.”

The blue of Stiles' shirt is soaked to navy where the stain is spreading. Stiles pats and rubs at it.

Isaac's heart still beats too fast, and he says the first thing that comes to mind. “Was it a fashion critic?”

“And people think _I'm_ the asshole.”

Isaac opens his mouth to say something and clicks it shut. He feels faint guilt twist in his stomach and says, “I – what happened?”

“You know what happened,” Stiles says, and the look he shoots at Isaac may have spelled out ' _bitch please_.' “You were having a panic attack so I ushered you out there. _Both_ of us got drenched with what I hope to any deity passing by is beer and _not_ vomit but was too busy to check due to the emergency at hand.”

Drenched? Right, the smell of alcohol wafts up from his clothes. Isaac glimpses down to see his shirt clinging to his side. “Oh.” He swallows. And again. “Thanks. For, you know. Getting me out there. I'm just --” Isaac trails off, then slumps against the wall next to Stiles, sinking down, legs spread out. From down here, he can only see the black net of the sky.

“Yeah, you were full on freaking out. I know a thing or two about that, believe it or not.” He says it so monotonously with the usual hints of his sarcasm that Isaac doesn't _understand_ right away.

Until he does, and starts to think. Stiles talks so much that it's easy to miss that he rarely talks about anything that matters.

“It's – it's not always like that,” Isaac says. “ _I'm_ not always like that. I'm not always this fucking -- _pathetic_ , okay? I've been to clubs before – it doesn't always happen. It didn't back during the rave --”

“Dude, you really don't have to justify yourself to me,” Stiles says, voice sour. “I get it, okay, pretty well, actually, but let's not pretend like we're the sort of people who would have heartfelt heart-to-hearts and braid each other's hair all night.” He pauses. “Although your hair is pretty nice.”

There's something left unsaid, a noise just below the edge of Isaac's hearing. He tries to fine-tune his ears to pick up on it, but now all he hears is the blood squelching through Stiles' veins, the low thrum of his arteries expanding.

He's forgetting something. He's forgetting –

“What happened to Scott? I should get back in there.”

Stiles doesn't look at him. “He and Allison went to talk to Clara just before – _before._ He didn't notice shit.”

“He'll notice that I'm _gone_ ,” Isaac says, voice rushed. “I gotta – hold on.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and flips it open. There's already a message from Scott: _where are you??_

Isaac takes a deep breath. Then writes, _I'm just outside with Stiles. Don't worry, we're good._

His phone lights up with the reply right away: _sure u dont want me to come find you?_

Isaac bites his lower lip. Thinks it over.

“Texting Scott?” Stiles asks casually. Isaac looks over and sees him looking up at the sky, eyes shifting as they scan it in circles.

“Yeah,” Isaac says. There's a sense of dread in his stomach still, like the last, desperate thrashes of the aftershock. He gnashes his teeth; he hears the echo loud and clear in his head.

> _Yes. Sure._

He snaps the phone shut and pockets it. Or tries, to, because he's forgotten that he's crouching and that it's not easy to shove a phone down pockets very aggressively while _crouching,_ and summarily ends up balancing himself on one heel while stretching out the other leg to awkwardly get to his sides.

Stiles takes one look at him, and looks away again with a grin on his face.

“Shut up,” Isaac says.

Stiles coughs forth a laugh, and then presses a fist to his mouth to stop it. “Dude.”

Isaac looks at him laughing for a before he decides to ignore it and slumps against the wall. He still hears the noise, the veins of melodies beating out of the thumping heart of the place they just left. Or maybe it's very faint, really, and he just has it in his ears still. Maybe it's kind of quiet. Maybe they're very alone right now.

“Are you drunk?” Isaac asks.

Stiles shrugs and licks his lips. “A bit.” He chuckles. “I mean, I _was_ before, and then the whole life-and-death oh-my-trauma situation sort of sobered me up, but now I think I feel it again. Wow.”

“Oh-my-trauma?” Isaac repeats, voice stretched thin. “You're such a fucking dick.”

Stiles shrugs. “So were you, Mr. badass Leather Twink don't-fuck-with-me dude. A dick, that is. You were a dick. A _big_ dick, too.”

“But not as big as --” Isaac breaks off. “Oh, fuck it.”

The laughter starts in Stiles' stomach and shakes his chest. “You walked right into that one, got no one else to blame.”

One of Isaac's eyebrows twitches in irritation. “And _Leather Twink_?”

“Oh yeah. You know with the, like --”

“I know what it _is_ ,” Isaac snaps. “What I don't know is if it's ever occurred to you that one better lay off the snark when they're dealing with --” He sends a glance around.

“We're alone, man,” Stiles says. “They're all at the party still. And it hasn't.”

Isaac tilts his head for a _look_.

Stiles' lips snag back for a cut-off chuckle. “Okay, so it _has_ , but I've gone through high school being Scott's best friend, I know all there is to know about surviving in close proximity to werewolves. Like, if anyone were to write, 'How to Live with a Werewolf And Survive,' there could only be my name on the cover. I'm not scared of you.”

Isaac decides not to mention that he wasn't talking about lycantrophy.

“You're a dick,” he settles on saying, the words de-fanged and wrangled into a mere statement.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “It is a problem.”

Isaac thinks of Scott, of Allison, of Jill and her awed smile, of the bartender and her glances at Stiles, and he says, “Doesn't seem like it is, really.”

Stiles grins up at the sky, his face blotched with heat, a mild drunken lack of focus in his eyes. “College has been good for me. What have you heard?”

Not a whole lot really, but a lot of it Isaac could surmise on his own. The first time Scott told him that Stiles had been out at night, Scott accidentally let it slip that he'd smelled of _sex,_ and Isaac had only just sat there, faint ripples of envy scratching his guts. He got used to it after a while, to how it has eased its way into conversations, into Scott mentioning that he stayed at the library late ( _again_ ) so Stiles could have their dorm room. He got used to names of girls and boys slipped into conversation, the slide so casual and practiced as if Isaac was somehow supposed to know who they were. Tamara is over. Stiles? Oh, he's out, he's with Zach or Angie or who the everloving fuck _ever_.

“I've heard enough.” A pause. “You're _different_.”

Stiles licks his bottom lip, stalls on his response. That's one thing, right there, a thing that has changed: a certain note to him that is practiced, eased, set and alluringly notched to the right altitude.

… He can't believe he just thought of Stiles as _alluring_ \--

“I made it out of high school alive.” Stiles shrugs. “I stopped being in immediate danger of spontaneous asphyxiation or stress-induced cardiac arrest, and, you know what? _That_? That made learning how to dial it down a notch easier. Made it one hell of a lot easier to just talk to someone.”

“Talk? That the new euphemism in town?”

“Ah, there weren't that many.” Stiles shakes his head to himself. Seconds pulse past. “Okay, no, fuck that, humility doesn't suit me. That part's been _awesome_. Finally had my v-card snatched away by the cute artsy chick from English 101, and since then it's been a constant upward climb.” He pauses. “Or, you know, a roll on the back, depending on who I'm with.”

“This fucking poetry,” Isaac says.

“Couldn't resist,” Stiles says. “At least that part's consistent.”

“Your lack of resistance is the one constant in this equation.”

“ _Z_ _zing_.” Stiles laughs. “Classiest way I've ever been called a slut.”

“Even run against your impressively-sized database of being called such?”

“Not that impressive, actually,” Stiles says. “This is college, man. Doing what you want to have a story to tell after is part of the point. People don't judge as much.”

 _A story to tell after, huh_. Isaac's never thought of it like that.

Stiles shuffles next to him, and rubs his hands together. “Yeah, I don't know about you and your wolfy fuel, but for me it's getting kinda chilly here.” Stiles pulls himself to wobbling feet. Isaac can hear the way the blood in his body shakes before it jolts back into the right direction. “Come on, let's go.”

“Where to?”

Stiles turns and grins. “Why ask? Didn't you ever dream of being taken on an adventure by a mysterious, handsome stranger?”

“No,” Isaac says.

“Okay, well. I guess sometimes you don't know you wanted something until it's about to happen.”

 

-

 

It's a park they end up going to, or what passes as a park on college campuses, anyway. “No one's supposed to be in there after dark, technically,” Stiles says, and takes a demonstrative step past the first tree. “Never really cared for _technically_.”

“Don't much care for rules?”

“Only when I made them,” Stiles says. “C'mon.”

Lights frame the way, big orbits with mosquitoes buzzing around them. It smells of pines in here, dirt and the water from a pond that must be here somewhere. The smell of humans other than Stiles is distant, concentrated from where they came, scattered throughout campus elsewhere. Stiles carries a plastic bag that contains some sort of booze that he ran into the house they'd been sitting in front of to get. Cans click against each other with each of his steps.

Conversation is a flow between them, interspersed by stretches of silence and a drunken chuckle. It's meaningless shit, for the most part, verbal volley that feels like an exercise in obliqueness and asshattery, and dusty old jokes whose magic still works.

“So, we didn't really hang out all that much in high school,” Stiles says.

“We hung out every day in, like, Chem. And French our senior year. Most of the extracurricular activities that involved us trying not to die. After school at Scott's on most days. During lacrosse.”

“And the locker rooms after,” says Stiles with a whiplash grin.

Isaac's steps slow.

“That's all true,” Stiles says, skipping over the tension. “But we never really talked much. You know, we did a lot of Scott-talk and a lot of okay-so-how-can-we-avert-the-apocalypse-talk and the occasional Brenda-is-wearing-a-see-through-top-talks, but never a _talk_ -talk talk.”

“The apocalypse was sort of more immediate,” Isaac says. “As were see-through tops.”

“Those weren't immediate enough.” Stiles sends him a glance. “I think I once jerked it in the school bathroom.”

“You would.”

“And did.” Stiles' face soaks to shadows when they pass below a roof of branches. “What's the most uncommon place you've ever jerked off in?”

“Shit,” Isaac says. “What's it feel like to be so shameless?”

“Liberating. Ever try it?”

“I've dabbled.” Isaac steps over a bed of leaves and watches one stick to his boots. “Air plane.”

“No way,” Stiles says. “How?”

“I am not giving you a step-by-step tutorial on how to manually stimulate your penis in an aircraft toilet.”

“Yeah, you dick, totally what I was asking. Why would you do it in the middle of a flight?”

“Why wouldn't you?” Isaac shrugs. “I was like fourteen, and it was a very long transcontinental flight. Some time after watching the same five episodes of _Friends_ on the in-flight entertainment twice I got bored of staring at the flight attendants.”

“Yeah, okay, and how was this manually stimulating your penis in an aircraft toilet?”

“Traumatizing.” A smile pulls up the edges of his mouth, and he swipes his hand across the back of his head in brief embarrassment. “We hit a turbulence just as I was about to come, which means I am now aware of what it feels like to orgasm while you hold on for dear life and internally debate whether it's more likely that you'll die from the plane going down or that you'll die falling down and your family's gonna find you with a broken neck and your hand around your dick.”

Stiles laughs so hard that he stops walking. “That's hilarious,” he says. “Why were you on a transcontinental flight anyway?”

Isaac's gaze sweeps up to the mellow light of a lamp. “We were going to visit family. In England.” He shrugs, and looks at the ground. “Mom was English.”

“She was?” Stiles says. “Didn't know that.”

“Yeah, well.” There's a sour taste in Isaac's throat. He swallows against it. “Wasn't ever big on sharing.”

“Not with me, anyway,” Stiles says, but the tension this sparks is diffused right away when Stiles chases it with a, “Truth or dare?”

Isaac blinks. Once, twice. “Fuck, _no_.”

Stiles grins. “Ah, you're still recovering from that one time when we played it at Lydia's and you ended up outing yourself as bisexual.”

“Yeah. Otherwise known as _the night we are not ever going to talk about ever_ ,” Isaac says.

“Yeah, okay, the night we totally aren't talking about _ever_ made my life a bit easier, though,” Stiles says. “With admitting the same thing.”

“Yeah,” Isaac says. “Except no one was even remotely surprised about you.”

Stiles stops walking and turns to Isaac, and there's something snake-quick in his eyes and the curve of his lips. “As if we were all just _shocked_ about you.”

The air _charges_. Isaac presses heel against the ground and halts. “What?”

Stiles' gaze drops to the plastic bag in his hand. “Care for a break and a beer?”

Isaac gives Stiles a pointed glare before he lets it go. “Whatever.”

“Undoubtedly tonight's motto,” Stiles says, and parks himself on a bench. He rustles through the bag and pulls out two cans, holding one out to Isaac.

“I can't even get drunk,” Isaac says, but sits down and snatches the can out of Stiles' hand. “This is pointless.”

“Yeah, yeah, Nietzsche.” The lid of the can pops and hisses open. “You really need to get laid. Cheers.”

Stiles brings the can to his lips and swallows down the beer. His Adam's apple bobs and Isaac's eyes right along with it.

Stiles' gaze sweeps over to him and jostle Isaac into action. He sloshes the beer around in his mouth, lets it trickle into every crevice of his mouth, then sucks it down over his tongue and swallows.

There's two splashes of light caught in twin lamps to either side.

Isaac hears two people somewhere, on the other end of the path, a boy and a girl. Laughter stretches to choked-off gasps ( _Here? Oh – oh but hurry_ ) and then there's such a sudden press of arousal that Isaac tunes them out with a toss of his head.

“So,” Stiles says, and leans back on the bench. “San Francisco, man.”

“Yeah.” Isaac drinks more of his beer. He _should_ be unwinding right now, should be relaxed and raw from the adrenaline drain of his recent episode. He still he feels like a rapt yet dread-filled listener waiting for a punchline that may or may not ever drop. Something's building inside him. A little more, and a little more. “Yeah.”

“I just noticed we spent a while talking about me, and college, and my life here, but nothing about you apart from the fact that you have a really short temper but probably also a really hot English accent that I'd absolutely love to hear.”

Isaac snorts. “Fine, I'll humor you. What do you want me to say?”

“Anything, whatever.”

Isaac goes still, thinks of London, the dazzle of life in the center, the intricate geographical expanse of its neighborhoods, the air full of rain. His mother, his grandparents, his cousins, the way they held their mouths, the poise to their chins, the careful, lifted enunciation –

“ _Anything_ , _whatever_ ,” Isaac says.

Stiles blinks. “Oh, shut the fuck up.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Isaac parrots with a lopsided grin.

“That sounds hot, dude,” Stiles says.

“That sounds hot, mate.”

“Shut up,” Stiles says, but hides his grin behind his can of beer. He takes a long, slow sip, pulls the beer through his teeth. “Why don't you use that accent to pick up girls?”

“You have such a one-track mind.”

“So do you,” Stiles says. “We always had that in common. A tendency to obsess.”

And just like that, Isaac's temper flares.

They've been strung atop a rapidly building pile of half-wrecked memories swathed in brimming tension. They've joked and played and teased while the pile crept up below, and now they've been fucking _skewered_ by the debris.

Isaac reaches out blindly, finds the front of Stiles' shirt, and hauls him in. “I'm done.”

Stiles' glasses scuttle down the bridge of his nose while the face beneath widens in shock. “What the --”

“I'm fucking _done_ ,” Isaac says. “Done, you hear me? You think I don't notice what you've been doing? How stupid do you think I am? You insinuate shit – you insult me – and then you draw back and smooth it over like that would make it all go away, and I'm not sure why you do this, but I'm _over_ it. What exactly is it you want to say?” His grip tightens. “Just say it already. 'Oh Isaac, your crush on Scott is so obvious and so obviously misguided.' _There_. Was that so hard?”

Stiles struggles against Isaac's grip.

Isaac hurls him in _closer,_ and Stiles' glasses drip off his face, clattering onto the bench. Beer splashes from his can and dribbles to the ground.

Isaac glares. “ _Huh_?”

Stiles blinks at him out of wide eyes. His lashes are so fucking long and thick. Fear flickers and then locks inside his eyes, and Isaac can feel the blood beat hammer-hard in his veins, and then he fucking _squints_.

“Right, you're gonna take it out on me,” Stiles says. “Misery is so much more comfortable, isn't it?”

Isaac laughs, and the sound rattles his head. “Oh, stop fucking telling me about _misery_. You think you have everyone fooled with your great new life and your new found popularity because no one at this school remembers the overzealous, entirely _weird_ kid you were? You've _moved on_?”

Stiles purses his upper lip in an ugly sneer. “No one moved on. But you're the one who's stuck _.”_

Stiles stinks of fear. His muscles are taut. Survival instinct must be like an air raid siren in his head, and yet, there's something cold and calculating on Stiles' face, something so poised that it makes Isaac want to hit him and see it clatter.

He doesn't. He wouldn't. He thinks of his therapist and Scott and his father and Allison and his father again, thinks of them like his mind is a wheel with their pictures glued on it that keeps spinning and _spinning_ and then --

Settles. “Don't pretend,” Isaac says, each word clear and careful. “Don't pretend like you didn't just go to this school because of _him_. We've all got to find our own paths? Then why are you _here_ and not at Stanford?”

The words ring loud and clear in the calm of the night. Everything he is and everything Isaac _breathes_ is tension.

A nervous tic pulls on Stiles' eyebrow. “You saw it. That letter.”

“You came here because of him,” Isaac says, voice low now. “And you want to talk to me about _dependency_ \--”

It must have happened in a flash, but to Isaac it seems to happen frame by frame. Stiles blinks. He thins his lips. His gaze drops to Isaac's lips. His breath breaks over them. He leans in.

He presses his lips to Isaac's.

Isaac halts all movement. The fist he still has curled around the front of Stiles' shirt loosens in shock.

Stiles breaks their lips apart without any sound, and Isaac's hand drops down.

Isaac's eyes are wide. Stiles has his closed, breathes through his mouth, his moist breath hot against Isaac's lips.

“I'm done, too,” Stiles says, and then he opens his eyes. “With _talking_.”

Isaac reaches out and grabs Stiles by the shirt again and crushes him against his chest and Stiles' lips against his own, and then he's biting on the lower lip, hard. Stiles responds and his arms wrap around Isaac's shoulders and Isaac presses open his mouth and pushes in his tongue.

Isaac doesn't even know what he's doing. It's as if every single nerve cell in Isaac's body is drawn to his mouth, where he has Stiles pressed against him, where he can taste him and lick him and bite him, and then his hand finds the back of Stiles' head and _tugs_ until his face is tilted back.

Isaac pushes in as deep as he can go.

Stiles lets out a muffled moan. Isaac keeps him in place and subjects Stiles to his tongue and swipes it everywhere, along the silk of his cheeks, along the ridges of his teeth, as far down his throat as he can go, and then –

Stiles bites.

Isaac groans and withdraws, breaking free from Stiles' lips with a gasp, but all he manages to gulp in is one breath before Stiles launches himself at him, one hand in Isaac's hair and the other pulling on his scarf. Stiles pulls until the scarf tightens and cuts off Isaac's oxygen. Giving Isaac a hard stare, Stiles smashes their lips together again, licking and biting and dictating Isaac's pace with tugs on his scarf.

Isaac moans and his hips thrust up against air by instinct.

Stiles comes closer, as if he heard it, as if he _felt_ it, and then he's on top of Isaac, straddling him and sitting down right on Isaac's cock. Isaac groans and lets his mouth go slack, allowing Stiles to take control, letting himself get kissed so hard that he can't think about how ridiculous this is. Can't think about _anything_ but that Stiles is on top of him and his mouth is hot and hard and his tongue is insistent, and it's so good, so fucking _good_ , just mindless making out, instinct and drumming hearts.

The air is cold when it hits Isaac's wet lips. He blinks his eyes open and looks up at Stiles.

“I want you,” Stiles says, and Isaac's instinct to ask _why_ is quieter than it's ever been.

Isaac's breath is rough and ragged. Stiles pants right along with him, their breaths fusing in the night air.

Isaac's gaze travels from Stiles' lips up to his eyes. “Where?”

“Not here, in my room, at the dorm, we can go there,” Stiles says in a rush. “I mean, there's an RA but he's really friendly. In part because I am in the possession of photographic evidence of that one time he got really drunk and streaked down the hallway with a yellow party hat strapped over his crotch, but well.”

For a good few seconds, Isaac doesn't know how to respond to this. Then: “You are blackmailing the RA.”

“Blackmail is...” Stiles trails off, squints his face. “A beautiful word, actually.” Stiles gets up, nearly trips over his own feet when he pulls himself off of Isaac, and then laughs, adrenaline-high and low. “Come on. Come _on_.”

 

-

 

Isaac doesn't know how they managed to walk all the way to Stiles' room. All he knows is that he stops along the way somewhere to press Stiles up against a tree and make out with him, to kiss him hard and thorough with Stiles moaning and carding his fingers through his hair until he pulls back with a gasp and pulls Isaac along. Stiles almost stumbles once, then twice, and even Isaac has trouble with coordination. He's shaking too hard. This is all too new.

He must have had his reason, but right now he can't remember why he's never done this before. 

They manage to stop making out once they enter the dorm, and Isaac feels his face flush to approximately two hundred degrees while they skip their way to the room, trying to avoid anyone's eyes. Then they walk in, and it's a room with two beds and two desks and it smells of sweat and boys and weed, but Isaac doesn't even fucking care, he doesn't fucking _care_ , and just backs Stiles back against the bed.

“Scott – Scott won't be back tonight, he'll be with Allis – _ah_.” Stiles breaks off and hisses when Isaac palms the front of his jeans. “Hold on.” He takes a step back to pull off his shirt and place his glasses on a desk.

Isaac unwinds his scarf and tosses it aside before walks right into Stiles and _pushes_.

They land in a tangle of limbs on the bed, Isaac on top. Cradling Stiles' head in his hands, Isaac slots their mouths together. The press is soft as the beat of a butterfly's wings at first, skin just barely touching, but then Isaac goes in, puts pressure behind it, and Stiles lets out such a deep, satisfied, unashamedly _honest_ moan that Isaac half-thinks he's never been this hard before in his life.

Stiles' mouth is wet and hot and there's a groan, and then there's words, or mumbles, or everything at once. Isaac doesn't really know, because Stiles is responsive and Stiles is into him and Stiles is _here._

Then Stiles presses a fist against Isaac's chest and tilts his head back to break the kiss. “Hey, do you – do you want me to suck you off? Do you want me to suck you? I wanna do that. Can I?”

There's 'yes' and there's 'no'; Isaac manages neither. He just rolls himself onto his back next to Stiles, places hand on his shoulder, and pushes down.

Stiles leans in to give him a peck on the lips before he travels down. A graze of teeth along Isaac's jaw, a hand beneath Isaac's shirt, a near-painful suck on the skin around his navel, and then Stiles' hands _finally_ brush against the front of Isaac's jeans.

Isaac wonders if it's due to his werewolf hearing that the sound of the zipper seems so deafening.

“Fuck.” Isaac thrusts on instinct. “ _Fuck_. Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Stiles echoes, pushes down Isaac's boxers, frees his cock, and leans in to swallow it.

Isaac tenses. His fingers tangle in the sheets.

_Fuck fuck so good hot wet good oh god fuck fuck_

“Yeah. _God_.” Isaac throws an arm over his eyes, decides it's too dark, and lets it fall back down onto the sheets, useless. He can't decide what to do with his limbs.

Stiles sucks cock like he loves it. He's fucking filthy, unashamed of the sloppy sounds he makes, of the way he moans whenever Isaac's cock slips out of his mouth, of the way he stuffs it back into his mouth and fucking _slurps_.

Isaac brings his hand down, curls his fingers into Stiles' hair. Tugs. _Hard_.

Stiles groans in reply, rolls up his eyes to give Isaac a glare.

Dry air cools on Isaac's cock when Stiles spits it out. Isaac blinks down, and Stiles is kneeling before him, lips hovering over Isaac's cock. “You wanna come in my mouth or...?”

Isaac thrusts against the air for a few beats before that question sinks in. “Uh?”

Stiles gives him a lopsided smile and moves up along Isaac's body until their faces are inches apart. “There's something else we could do.”

It takes Isaac a second. Then another. He opens his mouth to say something, finds he has no words, and clicks it shut.

Stiles leans in to mouth at Isaac's throat. He trails kisses up to his jaw, and then when he reaches his chin, he keeps very still. “You can fuck me, if you want.”

Isaac swallows.

 _But I've never,_ is not something he can say to Stiles. To Scott, maybe he could.

Not to Stiles.

“God _damn_ ,” Isaac says.

Stiles' breath is warm when he chuckles against him. “It's not hard. I mean, the act isn't, your cock most definitely is.” His breath skips along Isaac's cheeks, hot and heady. Stiles' mouth is close to Isaac's ear. “It's like – ugh, I just want it, come on.” He pants against Isaac's jaw. “Fuck me.”

Isaac can _visualize_ Stiles' arousal as a steady red beat set against a rising, bright wall of tension, and Isaac's body can't help but tense right along, and oh god. Fuck. _Fuck_. Isaac snorts with nerves. Then he stops breathing.

 _Clang clang clang_ , a sound booms in his head. It's instinct, tied down by chains of self-control.

The growls starts in his lower belly, twists up his esophagus, and then blasts out in a sound that opens Isaac's jaw and makes it snap shut again.

Isaac is still a virgin and he has spent years locked tightly between the ever-pressing manacle of sexual frustration, and he's just _done_.

He wants Stiles.

He fucking _wants_ Stiles, right now, right _now_.

Isaac grabs him by the shoulders, tosses him onto his back, rolls on top of him, and buries his face in the nape of Stiles' neck. Stiles' body jolts in shock. Surprise twists a gasp out of him.

It's about three-quarters turned on and one-quarter scared, and it couldn't be any more perfect.

“This is great,” Stiles manages. “Awesome. This is awe – oh yeah. _Ah_.” Stiles' body tenses and undulates in a frantic rhythm. His arms wind around Isaac's chest and hold him there, fingers scrapping against Isaac's shirt.

Isaac groans, jerks himself to his knees, and reaches behind himself to pull his shirt off from the back. His jeans go next, boxers included.

Stiles' eyes drop right down to Isaac's cock.

Isaac's face burns. “God.”

Stiles stretches out on the bed, his eyes a slow, satisfied drag up and down the entire length of Isaac's body.

“Take everything off,” Isaac says. “Now.”

“No,” Stiles says, and lifts his chin in a challenge. “ _You_ do it.”

Isaac yanks down the zipper of Stiles' jeans and pulls them off his legs. A visceral thrill pulses down from his eyes to lower parts when he sees Stiles' cock, hard and flushed and flat against his stomach.

Then Stiles leaps into a complete and utter non-sequitur: “Hey so, never had sex with a werewolf before. I asked Scott about it that one time and he said it wasn't anything too, uh, animalistic, but like, your cock isn't like, weird or anything, right?”

Isaac blinks. “We're about to – and you --” He pauses. Right. Sex with _Stiles_. “It's a cock. Maybe you would've noticed if something was off when you were _sucking_ it?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, that makes me happy, okay, moving on,” Stiles says, and reaches to the side, fumbles with the drawer on his bed side table, pulls out some lube and a condom. The muscles in his torso stretch with his movement, then slink back into relaxation when he flops back down on his back and spreads his legs.

There's a rush in Isaac's ears, the temporary awkwardness dispelled. Adrenaline flames up his veins.

A bottle of lube and a condom slaps againt Isaac's arm with a flick of Stiles' wrist. “Go on, with your fingers, come on,” he says, and his voice is just impatient, needy, _desperate_ enough that Isaac feels wanted.

“Oh, God,” Isaac says, and his mouth seems to swell, his breaths fast and broken. “I need --”

“I _know_ , I know,” Stiles says. “Need it too right now, oh fuck it, hold on.” He uncaps the tube of lube, coats his fingers with it, and reaches down. “Normally I'd insist you do it, but I think the order of the day is _as soon as fucking possible,_ so shut up, yeah.” He reaches down, down, down, swerving around his cock and down, and Jesus fucking _Christ_.

Isaac's mouth drops open to swear again, but he shuts it again, focus turned in to watching Stiles' fingers moving in and out, the knuckles grinding. Isaac sends a look from that to his own cock, and he's so fucking hard it's close to an _ache_.

Stiles releases a shaky breath. “Almost ready, already stretched earlier so it won't take that long, chill out and put on the rubber.”

“Hurry,” Isaac says, his fingers fumbling with the wrapper, and rolling it down over his dick. Then he decides to fuck it all and dips his head down to drag his mouth along the long stretch of Stiles' neck. He doesn't smell Stiles this time doesn't take him in – instead, he _gives_ , licks and bites and traces the jugular with his tongue.

“Shut up, I'm – okay, _there_.” One of Stiles' hands tangle in Isaac's hair, the fingers sticky with lube. “Now, go on, go.”

Isaac jerks his hips forward inexpertly, poking wet skin. Stiles gives a laugh, and reaches down, guiding Isaac's cock along skin, more skin, and _oh_.

“And now you just.” Stiles takes a deep breath. Sweat glitters on his brow. “Now you just – ah. _Ah_.”

The air around them collapses. It's all held in their lungs, flutters, swells.

Isaac releases it with a long, drawn-out moan. He noses against Stiles' jaw, presses his sounds against the heated skin. Fuck, it feels so good, so good, so fucking _good_ \--

Stiles exhales with a pain-burned groan of pleasure. His breath breaks over Isaac's cheeks, his brow, his forehead.

Stiles says, “Go on,” at the same time as Isaac rocks his hips forward again, slams his cock in and past inches of tight walls and then _home_ , locking their hips together. Stiles' cock pulses against Isaac's belly where it's pressed between their bodies.

Isaac closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then withdraws and thrusts in again.

“Fuck. _Slower_ , gimme some time here,” Stiles says, an edge to his voice. “Like this, idiot.” He puts his hands on Isaac's waist and urges his hips forward, digging his thumb into the front to dictate the speed. Stiles pulls Isaac's hips into slow, but hard thrusts, and Isaac lets him guide him, surrenders to Stiles in a steady rock of hips and slaps of flesh and heated kisses.

A jugular, a sharp jaw, the beat of a pulse. Stiles' smell, that unique smell of his, his identity, the scent by which Isaac could pick him out of thousands. Their noses knock together. Breath catches between them. Isaac sees flashes of brown eyes and moles and long, slim limbs.

“S-So good,” Isaac hears himself say. “You're so good,” and Isaac's sure Stiles has heard that from every other guy who ever fucked him before too.

Stiles only chuckles and says, “Faster,” and the word is like compulsion.

Every one of Isaac's thrusts pitches in a satisfying noise from Stiles, excited and shameless. And _oh_ ,it feels even better to go fast, to release tension and to follow the instinct to thrust and thrust and _thrust_ into that delicious heat.

Then Stile tangles his hand in Isaac's hair and _yanks_ on it.

“Ow.” Isaac glares at Stiles, and feels a growl tear from his throat.

“Fuck, that's _hot_.” Stiles' hand tightens in Isaac's curls.

Isaac snatches Stiles' hand away from his hair and pins it against the bed with another growl.

Isaac _feels_ the energy leap down Stiles' body in a visceral shudder.

“Oh yeah.” Stiles strains his pinned-down wrist against Isaac's hand. Isaac feels his pulse spike. “Just like that.”

A sense of rationality kicks into Isaac's head. “You're human, I --”

“I can take it. I like it a bit rough,” Stiles says. “I t-tell you if I can't, so just _do_ it, come on, aren't you a good lay? Not gonna make it g-good for me?”

“Shut up.” Isaac dips down his head and buries it in the nape of Stiles' neck, where his scent is strongest. He presses his forehead against it, traps the heat between them, and slams in so hard and fast they both gulp in air.

Then release it in a mess of moans and grunts, and Isaac relinquishes yet more of his control, chasing the thrust with another and then another, in, in, in, _in_ , until Stiles tenses and his hands find Isaac's hair and he _pulls._ Stiles hisses, “Slower now, that's – that's good, oh yeah, this is good, just like that.”

Isaac groans and shuts him up by slotting their mouths together.

The pressure mounts, tightening Isaac's muscles, chopping up his breaths, and Isaac locks their hips together with a grunt. He stays like this for a second, grinding the head of his cock as deep inside as it can go. “I'm gonna come,” Isaac warns. “ _Close_.”

Stiles swallows, nods, and cants his hips, grinding down _against_ Isaac, and this is _it_.

Isaac places both of his hands against the mattress. The roll of his hips originates from his lower back and then snaps forward, and again, and again, his breath sucked in, his muscles tensed, his toes curled, and yeah, he's there, the last mind-numbingly good moments before orgasm when he can't think and can't breathe and can't anything and then. It. _Hits_.

Isaac collapses with a drawn-out moan. His hips jerk forward with kicking nerves. The pressure in his body releases in spurts, one, two, _three_ , and Isaac clenches his eyes shut and his breath hitches with the last few aftershocks.

He's a clean state, an empty head and loose muscles.

Isaac only comes to when he feels Stiles' hand move.

He blinks the groggy feeling away, and raises himself up on his arms. He hisses because he's too sensitive, moves his hips back a bit until his cock slips out. He reaches down and pulls off the condom, and barely has the presence of mind to tie a knot into it before he tosses it aside.

“No,” Isaac says, and yanks Stiles' hand off when he starts stroking himself. “I want – I want to do it. I want to be the one who makes you come.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, and settles back. “Yeah, go on then, I'm _almost_ \--”

It only takes a tug, then two, with Stiles rutting into Isaac's movement and Isaac's fist clenched over his cock. Stiles' staccato breaths peak with a choked sound and then _release_ in a series of shuddering moans. Isaac stares at his face, at the way it melts and widens, at the way his mouth drops open in bliss.

The knowledge that _he_ was the one responsible for it thrills Isaac to his core.

Stiles thrusts into his hand a couple more times before he sinks back into the mattress. He brushes a wet strand of hair out of his forehead, and exhales with a, “Wow.” He breaths in and out twice more. “Wow. That was – that was good.”

Isaac's hand is soiled and sticky. Neither of them cares.

Isaac collapses next to Stiles. He turns his face toward the ceiling, looking up at it without seeing it.

Reason trickles back in, but makes no impression.

“Gonna sleep,” Stiles says. “You can stay.”

Isaac's not sure he could leave even if he wanted to.

They don't fall asleep cuddling, but when they slip beneath the sheets and settle down, Stiles' arm ends up across Isaac's chest.

The last thing Isaac says before he falls asleep is, “You have nice hair, too.”

The last thing either of them says is, “Dude. _Random_.”

 

-

 

Isaac wakes up in the middle of the night to Stiles nibbling on his shoulder. His muscles relax by instinct, undulate and stretch.

Stiles trails hot kisses up to his ear. “I want more sex.” Stiles' breath breaks over the shell of Isaac's ear. “You didn't come in my mouth. Wanna know what you taste like.”

“God,” Isaac says, but he only shudders when Stiles goes lower. Grits his teeth together when hot breath teases along the head of his cock. Lets out a moan when Stiles puts it into his mouth. Rides the pleasure out in waves along his torso, his long limbs, eyes closed and lips parted.

Stiles is firmer about it this time, less sloppy, more precise. Isaac's fingers find his hair and try to dictate the pace, but Stiles gives a groan and snatches Isaac's hands away, presses down Isaac's legs with his arms. Stiles goes slower when Isaac tells him to go faster, speeds up when Isaac asks him to slow down.

Stiles doesn't seem to like being told what to do in bed; he likes being in control, likes being the master of Isaac's pleasure. He brings Isaac right to the brink a couple of times and then pulls off his mouth to suck on his thighs, fist working at an idle pace.

Isaac groans and ruts up and _aches_ with frustration. “Let me come,” he says. “Fuck, Stiles, come on, _please --_ ” and Stiles tightens his lips and thrusts his face down, and again, and again, his nose pressed against Isaac's stomach, and Isaac teeters over the edge. Stiles' throat muscles constrict around him when he swallows.

After, Isaac presses Stiles onto his back, and kisses a trail down along his chest. He's never sucked a cock before, but it's easy and natural – he can feel what Stiles likes, senses the tension in his muscles at specific spots and speeds, hears the appreciative moans. Stiles is active besides, tugs on Isaac's hair, gives him instructions, tells him to go _faster, slower, more teeth, more tongue._ He presses Isaac's mouth down onto his cock and fucks up into it.

Isaac allows it all. It's comfortable to leave the control up to someone else.

“Close,” Stiles says. His fingers tighten in Isaac's hair.

The muscles in Stiles' thighs tense and then jump against Isaac's hand. His cock swells and then kicks. It doesn't taste good when Stiles releases in his mouth. Isaac swallows it all down anyway. He even sucks on the tip for the last droplets after Stiles has stopped shaking.

He sits up to flash Stiles a smirk. Stiles returns it, then pulls Isaac down by the back of his neck. The kiss tastes bitter and salty, grows from calm to competitive in a matter of seconds, but Isaac feels good and sated when he breaks away and lies down on his back next to Stiles.

“Fucking awesome,” Stiles says.

“Yeah, fucking awesome.” Isaac's lips tingle.

Stiles glances at him. They forgot to switch off the light when they fell asleep; Isaac can see the flush on his cheeks, the laziness in his eyes. “Were you a virgin?”

Isaac's too lazy for snark. “Yeah. I was. Until some hours ago.”

“I had the feeling,” Stiles says. “Which doesn't mean you were bad, because you were the opposite of bad, like really good, but –- how exactly is a dude still a virgin when he looks like _you_?”

Isaac swallows, and the old wound throbs in phantom pain. "Did you see how I reacted to your hot bartender friend?"

"Yeah, wow, you totally bombed," Stiles says. "I bet there's plenty of people who'd fuck you despite the awkwardness, though."

"You would know."

"I sure do. So?"

"I keep to myself." Isaac stares straight into the light bulb on the ceiling. Bright spots of color spiral into his vision. " _And_ I'm a werewolf, and I'm not sure it's even possible to have a relationship with someone, or even just sex, and not have them notice that shit. And --" _And then there was_ Scott. "So yeah, all that? Not exactly an aphrodisiac to most girls."

“What about dudes?” Stiles asks. “Oh, and use your British accent. C'mon, do it.”

“For God's _sake_ ,” Isaac says. He blinks until his vision returns to normal and turns his head to look at Stiles. “I'm pickier with men, all right? Just because I'm bisexual doesn't mean I want to hump everything with a pulse.”

“Well, you've worked in a graveyard before, I was going to compromise on the _pulse_ thing --”

Isaac jabs a finger into Stiles' side. Stiles squirms away with a chuckle.

“So, is this a usual thing for you?” Isaac asks. “Fucking your friends?”

Stiles snorts. “Didn't we spend an entire conversation in the park harping on and on about how we _weren't_ friends?”

“I think we were saying we were friends by association,” Isaac says.

“After which we traded some barbs about said association,” Stiles says. “Whose name starts with _S_ and ends in - _ott_.”

“No, pretty sure it doesn't.” Isaac runs a hand through his messy curls. “Pretty sure it isn't _Sott_.”

“Wiseass,” Stiles says. “And no. Haven't been with anyone I knew from high school.”

“That explains a lot.”

“Wasn't a good time for any of us.” Stiles rolls onto his back. “High school really blew. Figuratively. Never literally. Literally would've been fun.”

Isaac considers it. “I miss it.” The words are out and settle in the air before he can think them through. “I mean, it would've been a lot better with regular blow jobs, for sure --”

“So why don't you do something about it?” Stiles asks, and Isaac stops talking. “Why don't you do something about the fact that your life blows, and not in the good way?”

Anger sparks in the pit of Isaac's stomach. “Yeah,” he says with a snort. “That's how you are, isn't it? Even when you're kind, you're cruel. You don't believe in soft and clean, do you?”

Stiles frowns. “I'm not a fucking laundry detergent commercial.”

“No, not half as chipper and happy,” Isaac says. “Two can play this game.”

“Shove it,” Stiles says.

Isaac looks at him. “I won't have any trouble figuring out where.”

Stiles kisses him. Isaac responds, running his hands along his shoulders and up his neck to his full web of hair.

It feels so natural that Isaac really does wonder why he's never thought of hooking up with Stiles before. The chemistry is definitely new, though, new and exciting. It occurs to him that he doesn't usually think of Scott when he kisses Stiles. Not like he used to think of him when he kissed Erica. When he kissed that one girl at the party. When he kissed his roommate Cole a few weeks ago.

His mind doesn't stop reeling, though, thoughts and images flitting through his mind while he pulls Stiles closer and opens his mouth. Scott, he thinks, was a bit like the sun that kept the planets that was his pack oscillating on their pre-determined rounds. He was like the center of gravity that sent Isaac's own planet veering off course in a gyrating spiral once he was gone.

And Stiles?

He's _different,_ but Isaac doesn't know how or why, and anyway Stiles is getting really into the making out, and the thoughts in Isaac's head scatter bit by bit.

( Except for a couple: _maybe he's different because he's not a part of Scott's pack, but rather a part of Scott himself._

 _Maybe that's where they differ, he and Stiles_ )

 

-

 

Isaac wakes up when the smell hits him, and he sits up in complete disorientation, blinking against the lights.

Stiles stirs next to him. He's on his stomach, one hand next to his face with the wrist facing inward. He blinks open an eye, then the other. “What?”

“Get up,” Isaac says, voice panicked. “Get the fuck up, get dressed.” Isaac bounces off the bed, and starts to hunt for his clothes. Where did they throw them last night, where are his boxers, oh, _there_ they are, and his jeans, where are _they_ \--

“What in the world?” Stiles asks, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “Dude, it's not even eight in the morning.”

“Scott,” Isaac says, and the word screeches. “He's here, coming up. And Allison. She's there, too, so _hurry up._ We got maybe a couple of minutes, if that.”

“Fuck,” Stiles says. “He doesn't usually come back this early, shit, shit _shit_.” Stiles sits up. “Where are my clothes?”

“I can barely find my own,” Isaac says, his volume going up. He rifles through a pile of clothes on the floor, and pulls apart two shirts. “Shirt. Catch.”

Stiles pulls it over his head, and then slides off the bed to join Isaac on the floor, and they spend a hasty few seconds shuffling around like two drunken rabbits while repeatedly elbowing each other ( _“Those are my jeans” – “No, they're mine, I wear a smaller size” – “Whose sock is that?”_ ) and by the time Scott and Allison blaze into the room, Isaac is wearing jeans, a scarf, one sock, and no shirt, while Stiles is clad in a shirt, _two_ socks, and one pair of boxers.

Scott blinks. He opens his mouth and shuts it again. He looks from Stiles to Isaac and then to Stiles again, and says, “Good... morning.”

Allison slaps a hand over her mouth. Isaac feels the heat flush her face. “Sorry,” she says. “We knew you were both in here, but we didn't...”

Stiles, of course, decides to take the situation by the horns, and waves at them awkwardly. “Hey. Good morning, guys. Nice day, isn't it? I mean, I haven't looked outside yet, so it's entirely possible it's raining or whatever, but it's sure shaping up to a very nice day, right?”

Isaac pinches the bridge of his nose. “ _Dork_. Put on some bloody _trousers_.”

Scott blinks, Allison says, “Okay, I'll just – wait outside,” and Stiles sends Isaac a glare before he leaps to his feet and stomps into his jeans.

“ _You_ put on a shirt,” Stiles says, and tosses one at Isaac. “Sorry, Scotty.”

Isaac pulls the shirt over his head, then gets to his feet, shoulders hunched by instinct. He scratches the back of his head and looks at the floor and the ceiling and out of the window, and anywhere but at Stiles and Scott.

“I'm gonna join Allison,” Stiles says, and swooshes past them both, sneaking out through the door. It clicks closed behind him, and Isaac finally raises his eyes to meet Scott's.

Scott meets his gaze evenly. There's no trace of anger (or worse: disappointment), but there's hints of embarrassment and curiosity. He treads the floor, then takes a step closer. “Just so you know, _'it's not what it looks like'_ is not gonna fly. Werewolf nose, all right?”

“Ugh.” Isaac rubs the back of his head for another few beats before he drops his arm.

“Yeah,” Scott says, and a small smile quirks up the corners of his lips and etches dimples into his cheeks. “You can use my soap when you wash up. It's the yellow piece. Stiles owns all the other ones.” Scott trails off. “Well, I'll be outside, then.”

“Scott.” Isaac's tongue feels too large for his mouth, so he moves it around. He can't help it. He can't help the part of him that's approval-seeking, the part of him that has every single nerve cell pointing at Scott in flashing red arrows. “Are you mad?”

It comes out quiet, tentative. He's sixteen years old again.

Scott blinks in surprise, and tilts his head.

Isaac's ear reach for his heart beat, but he can't place the rhythm.

“ _Should_ I be?” Scott asks.

“I don't know.”

“Isaac,” Scott says. “I'm not mad. No. You're allowed to make your own choices. You like Stiles? Okay, well, I never considered _that_ possibility, and you're gonna have to allow me the freedom to make fun of you for that at regularly-scheduled intervals, but _mad_? Nah.”

Isaac exhales in relief, small, honest, grateful smile on his lips. Then he blinks. “Wait. I didn't say I _liked_ him. It's not like that.” Well, to be honest, he doesn't know what the fuck it _is_ , but – “It just... uh, happened.”

Scott squints. “Isaac, I love you, but I don't need to hear the gory details at eight AM in the morning.”

“Sorry.”

“Not apologies, either.”

“Okay.”

“That's better.” Scott's smile makes the air around him glow.

Isaac feels every fiber of his body drawn toward it.

Just before he realizes with startling clarity that he's no longer sure if it's his wolf calling for his alpha or something else, and he's always just _known_ that it was both. It's enough to startle Isaac and enough for Scott to _notice_ and tilt his head.

“You all right?” Scott asks, and the worry in his voice is so sincere that Isaac aches in the way he always does around Scott.

But it's different now.

“It's funny how things change,” Isaac says, and it sounds like it's coming from someone else. “How people do. Sometimes it just creeps up on you. Sometimes it's so sudden that it feels like you fell asleep knowing what your life was only to wake up and discover you don't know anything.”

"Sometimes you even wake up and discover you slept with Stiles," Scott says helpfully.

Heat rushes into Isaac's face. 

Scott gives a mild shrug. “Nah, okay, sorry. Think of it this way:  wouldn't it be more worrisome if nothing ever changed? Wouldn't that be more scary? If we were just frozen in the same stage our entire lives? I don't think that's how it's supposed to be. Life's, like, a forward-moving... thing, and dude, okay, it's too early for this talk.” Scott takes a deep breath. “Come on, we're gonna show you some more of campus today. We can grab lunch and maybe a movie and just hang out. Are you leaving in the afternoon?”

“Yeah,” Isaac says, most of his mental focus still on other topics. “Promised Cole we'd work on this paper together. I could blow him --” Isaac stops.

Scott grins. “Oh. I see.”

“No.” Isaac gives a startled laugh. “I was gonna say I could blow him _off_ , but yeah, I shouldn't. I'll leave in the afternoon. We should go.”

“Yeah, about that,” Scott says. “Just one thing? You and Stiles should probably take a shower. Like. Right now.”

 

-

 

When they spill out from the dorms back onto the campus, the sun is already a bright disc in the sky. It dapples on the buildings and trees around them and glints off the smooth veil of Allison's hair.

It does little to diffuse the tension, but they manage it on their own, one well-worn joke and good-natured glance at a time. Isaac avoids looking into Stiles' eyes where he can, doesn't want to think about what happened last night, avoids the topic whenever it comes up.

He catches Scott and Allison glancing at him and then at Stiles sometimes, as if they're mentally putting them together like pieces of lego to see where they fit and where they don't. They stop doing it as soon as they notice Isaac's gaze on them and skip over the moment with a smile and a joke.

Allison and Scott are both good at this, at navigating the landscape of social interactions. Isaac and Stiles, well, they're worse, but they seem to skate along the traps and slides while propped up by their finesse, caught up in the nostalgia they created.

Stiles always smelled of Scott. Now he smells of _Isaac_.

It's something only he and Scott can smell, and he knows that Scott knows even if they don't talk about it. It doesn't matter anyway; soon, he'll go back to smelling like Scott because Scott is who he lives with. Scott's his other half.

Isaac gets another tour of campus, and notices little things he didn't when he first arrived. The architecture that differs from his own campus's; it's more modern, less pretentious. The students, they may be a little more low-key all in all. When they stop by a coffee shop, a cute dark-eyed barista whose name tag consists only of the letter 'V' hands him a capuccino with a wink and a phone number and the words ' _hot accent_ ' scribbled on the cup.

Isaac rubs the back of his head in embarrassment, but Allison catches on to it, flashes him a smile, encourages him to keep the number. Stiles says nothing and takes a deep sip of his own coffee. Scott ping-pongs a bemused look along all three.

During lunch, they start talking about Isaac's life in San Francisco, and even though he's already told Scott and Allison most of it, he recounts the same tales again. His friends, Josh and Mia, who he maybe really should pay more attention to. His taciturn roommate with the peculiar sense of humor. The girl in his creative writing class that keeps catching him after class and always leaves behind a cloud of cinnamon-scented perfume. Why doesn't he ask her out, Allison asks, and Isaac doesn't know.

Or he does, but never wanted to think about it.

After lunch, back outside beneath the open sky, Allison takes a phone call from her father and wanders to the side where she stands with the phone pressed to her ear and a concentrated look on her face. The conversation turns more heated, Scott approaches her to listen in.

Isaac watches her take his hand with a grateful smile.

Which leaves Stiles and Isaac by themselves for the first time since they they woke up this morning. They clear their throats at the same time. Then trade glances.

“So,” Stiles says.

“So,” Isaac says. He glances back to Allison. She's out of human earshot, and he chooses not to listen in. “She... seems to have a rough time with her dad.”

“Yeah, well,” Stiles says, and clears his throat. “She took over the family business, which can't be easy, but she's got her shit together. You have to admire that. She can handle her own. Even if she lets Scott hold her hand sometimes for comfort.”

“Maybe we all need some hand holding sometimes,” Isaac says.

Isaac watches Stiles bite his lower lip, and how it slides back out.

“Did you...” Isaac shrugs, and injects a heavy dose of fake-affability into his tone. “Did you want to talk about it?”

Isaac expects Stiles to be reflexively sarcastic, to pretend he doesn't know what Isaac means, but he instead he says nothing. It's only when Isaac feels a tug around his neck that he notices that Stiles has his fingers wrapped around his scarf, that he's toying with it just like he used to, back in high school.

“Why do you keep doing that?” Isaac asks.

“Honestly? Partly because it annoys you.” The smile on his face is uncharacteristically slow. “Partly because it distracts me, maybe. Keeps me busy. And yeah.” He shrugs, and the sun light reflects on his glasses. “We can talk about it, sure, why not? Not like it's gonna be supremely awkward or anything.”

“Speak for yourself,” Isaac says. “I'm not scared.”

Stiles pauses. He looks at the ground and then up at Isaac.

Isaac holds his gaze. An engine starts in the air, kicking up the tension like dirt. Isaac feels a slow smile creep onto his lips.

Hearing movement to his right, he turns to see Allison flip her phone shut.

Stiles tilts his chin up. “Call me when you're back in San Francisco. We'll talk. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“You better not be freaking out,” Stiles says. “So, you know. Avoid the cramped spaces.”

“You bastard,” Isaac says. “For that, _you_ have to call _me_.”

Stiles sends a glance over to Scott and Allison. “Okay. Will do.”

Scott and Allison sidle up to them, he with his hand on the small of her back, she smiling bravely. “Sorry,” Allison says. “That took longer than we thought. Dad and I are having some disagreements about the direction of the business.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Isaac says.

Scott looks from Isaac to Stiles with a teasing grin on his face. “We didn't interrupt anything, did we?”

“Oh God,” Stiles groans. “Seriously? You can be _such_ a gossip queen sometimes. When exactly did that happen? That's not how I taught you, buddy.”

“It's okay, Scott,” Isaac says. “Just because I fucked Stiles doesn't mean we need to dance around the issue. He said he'd call me.”

All energy drains out of the air for a couple of beats. Stiles chokes on his own saliva. Scott blinks. Once, twice, and then he breaks into a grin. “You topped? _Yes_ , I had my money on you.”

“We are not having this conversation,” Stiles says, his voice pitching in the middle. “Fucking hell, Isaac.”

It starts at the lowest pit of Isaac's stomach, shakes his torso, and then spills out of his throat in a series of loud chuckles that get louder and _louder_ until he has to hold his stomach. He laughs so hard he feels tears prick at the back of his eyeballs, and then he hears Scott joining in, and then Allison.

It's too absurd. Isaac's been here a day, and he's already lived more than he has in the past seven months combined.

It's too fucking _absurd_.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, tonelessly. “For anyone just tuning in, you are watching the _Crazy Channel_.”

They all ignore him. Isaac laughs until he can't anymore, and then, after he's wrenched his body dry of laughter, the four of them catch a movie. It's some sort of comedy movie with jokes that are either recycled or just plain bad, but Isaac thinks it's entertaining anyway. Scott and Allison are huddled to his right, their fingers intertwined. Stiles is to his left, not shutting up, inserting dry commentary into each and every scene. Isaac's well past the point of getting annoyed.

They break up in front of the theater after, Scott and Stiles excusing themselves to go to their drama club meeting. They ask Allison to come along, but she shakes her head, says she'll wait until they're done, and catches Isaac's eyes.

He parts from Scott with a hug that seems to go on forever. When it comes to saying goodbye to Stiles, they stand in front of each other in a complete mirror of their awkward will-we-or-won't-we dance in the coffee shop the day before before Isaac says, “Oh, fuck it,” and pulls Stiles into a brief but tight hug.

It's only been a day, but the hug feels so much more honest.

He lets go before it can bring back too many visceral memories, and pats him on the shoulder. Scott grins, links his arm with Stiles', and pulls him away while Stiles launches into a half-hearted rant and Scott sends Isaac a smile over his shoulder.

Then they round a corner, and they're _gone_ , and it's just Isaac and Allison now. He says he'll have to drive back. She says that she'll walk him to his car, and so they go.

They pass the walk quietly, trading stories in a low murmur. She tells him about her business, her life, glosses over her relationship with Scott without going into detail. When they reach Isaac's car, they halt, and he turns around to face her.

“You should come to visit me sometime,” Isaac says. “You. And Scott. And Stiles. Lydia, if she's nearby.”

 Allison's lip gloss shimmers when she smiles. “Sounds great. I haven't been to San Francisco in a long time.” She pauses, and he realizes that there's something she wants to say, so he falls quiet. Waits.

“How's your therapy going?” she asks.

Isaac looks at the ground. “It's, well, it's _going_. I mean, there's always forward moving, and there... setbacks as well, always. But we're optimistic.” He looks at her again. “There's no way to go but forward.”

“Sounds like something Scott would say,” she says.

“It is.” He glances up at the sky, smiles to himself. “He's said that.”

She cranes her neck to look up at him. “You know, Scott and I are back together, but even so, this...” She makes a vague hand gesture. “This has always been _their_ story. They're different. They care about you, though. They talk about you.” Her face softens. “Often.”

“I thought they might,” Isaac says, then adds, teasingly, “Jealous?”

A smile splits her mouth. “Don't think for a second I couldn't kick your ass, Lahey.”

“Wouldn't have it any other way.” He pauses. “Co-dependency?”

“Yeah.” Allison nods. “Definitely that. That's where they're static, but they learned to live with it. But it's nothing to envy.”

Isaac wonders. “Isn't it?”

“No,” she says, voice firm. “It's not.”

“Thank you for asking about my therapy,” he says. “Things between us haven't always been...”

"Yeah, what with the whole me-trying-to-kill-you thing,” she says, voice light. “And then us becoming friends because of Scott. And our ideologies not always meshing all too well.”

Isaac leans down for a hug.

She steps forward and wraps her arms around him. Their relationship has never been easy, born out of cold anger, mellowed to awkward tension, evened out in understanding with only occasional hints of wariness. He used to feel a similar spark for her that he felt for Scott, only much less intense; now, he only feels the warmth of her body.

They part, and she shakes a strand of dark hair out of her face. “If you ever need girl-help, I may be able to help.” She pauses. “And don't be a stranger. Really.”

“Yeah.” His mouth feels dry. “I shouldn't. I won't.”

He watches her turn around and walk away after that, sending the occasional glance over her shoulder until she disappears behind the gates. Isaac leans against his car and reads the lettering above the gate over and over. _Beacon Hills State._ It could have been his future, once.

Maybe it still could be _part_ of it.

 

-

 

Several playlists on Isaac's iPod date back to high school. There's the one playlist that Scott made, back when they all took Stiles' Jeep to hunt down a witch in Sunnyvale and had to commemorate the car's demise at the end of it all. There's another made by Lydia as a farewell present when he left for San Francisco, and it's full of songs they used to listen to when they all huddled together at Scott's house to plot or plan or play. The playlist has got some of everyone: Lydia's Regina Spektor songs, Allison's indie rock, Scott's punk music, Stiles' eclectic taste that ranges from low-key ambient to death metal.

Isaac listened to it all on his drive from San Francisco to Beacon Hills. This time, he stops the music after the third song, until all he can hear is the purr of the engine and the wheels beating down on the asphalt.

Isaac has always avoided being alone with his thoughts. His mind has always been a graveyard littered with coffins, both open and closed. This time, when he sinks into his own head, he finds nothing.

Maybe he could get used to spending time with himself.

Then he fills his head with his recent memories, thinks back to the party, the death-like grip of the panic attack, the cool air on his skin when Stiles pulled him outside. The sting of Stiles' barbs, the heat of his skin. The warmth of Scott's smile, and Allison's. The memories spin and knit together into a tapestry of emotion that he can't place.

He thinks back to what he said to Stiles, just before Stiles kissed him. The kiss had been effective at jostling the thought out of his head as soon as he had released it, but it's stuck around, like a lungful of dispelled air that seeped through his pores after. He'd actually admitted it to someone out loud, even if it had been in boiling anger that sizzled into something else. 

He'd said it. He'd told Stiles something he'd never even been able to tell himself, and that --

That made it _real_ , something he could work with, something he could touch and prod and _change_ , and he thinks it maybe already has.

He looks out through the windshield at the winding road and thinks of how many people have used the road as a metaphor for life before and if any of them had ever thought of him. The sky spins up ahead infinitely wide above the veins of the road; Isaac dashes along it, going toward something. Moving. He finds comfort in the thought.

Stiles said one should do things for the story to tell after. Is this a good story?

He doesn't know.

What he does know is this: good or not, it's the first story that feels like _his own._

 

-

 

When Isaac stops at the first gas station on his way back to San Francisco and flips his phone open, a text message blinks back at him.

 

> _From: Stiles_
> 
> _you're not off the hook for that comment just so you know_

 

 Isaac grins, and his thumbs fly over the buttons.

 

> _To: Stiles_
> 
> _Yeah? Try and catch me._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to burningletter-, without whom this fic would never have been written, and whose edits helped make it a lot better than it would've been without her (me no speak Americano, see). Many thanks also go to tumblr users santanaisbitho, vvesper and micranil, who helped with cheerleading, questions and motivation. 
> 
> Happy Stisaac week, and many thinks to those who put it together, even if this isn't really a very romantic fic. If you hadn't, I may never have gotten my butt into gear, sad to say.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who read this thing, even though it's a very weird rambling, bildungsroman-y (????) idek banter UST gay sex kind of... thing. Thing.


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